


The Devil's Husband: Pacific Rim

by Saintduma



Series: NaNoWriMo: The Devil's Husband [6]
Category: Original Work, Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: M/M, NaNoWriMo
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-11-07
Updated: 2015-11-06
Packaged: 2018-04-30 09:38:01
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,247
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5158943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Saintduma/pseuds/Saintduma
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>This is part of a series done for NaNoWriMo. It is not at all edited. The "chapters" are very short, because they're really just bursts of words, not because they're meant to be full-length chapters by any means. This is primarily just so I can organize them.</p>
<p>Hael is connected somehow to the creation of the Jaeger neural interface systems... and is here to do SOMETHING, but no one is quite sure what.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

Raleigh Beckett regarded the black-haired man sitting across from him with no shortage of skepticism. If he didn’t know better-- know that Tendo Choi wouldn’t fuck with him like this-- he’d never believe the pretty-boy sitting across from him was who Tendo said he was. But Sachael Urmen even had an ID from the exact same agencies Raleigh had once possessed, when he and Yancy had been active, had been Jaeger co-pilots.

“She was name for the engines in World War 2,” Raleigh explained. “De Havilland Gipsy Moth airplane engines. It was state of the art but incredibly easy to replicate on an assembly line. That’s what she was named for.”

“Oh, I know,” Hael replied. “I remember them.”

Wait. That seemed... incorrect, for this. This... series of memories.

“That’s what Caitlin Lightcap was hoping for her, designing her,” Hael continued. “That her model-- her core design, I mean, the...” he gestured to his chest, unable to remember the words. He was frustrated as they slipped from him, left him with words close to what he meant, in other languages, but that did not mean the same thing; and in one of those other languages, he softly swore, and scowled at the beer growing warm in his hand. 

“Her nuclear reactor?” Raleigh was not understanding any clearer. How could Hael have known Lightcap? Even if she’d designed the specific way the Lady Danger’s nuclear reactor worked, that was 2017. Earlier, even. Hael couldn’t be any older than Raleigh himself was.

“Yes, that,” Hael said, and looked relieved to have the words. “We talked a lot about it. Sergio wasn’t usually that interested, you see. He was far more interested in the pilot recruitment techniques... testing for drift compatibility. The tests you went through.” He sipped the beer, and looked pleasantly distant for a moment, as he remembered. “Well. So Caitlin and I talked about it quite a lot. I told her about the de Havilland engines; of course she knew about them, from an engineering standpoint, from far before. But she did a lot of research after we talked. She had hoped the innovations in Gipsy Danger’s reactor would lead to innovations in the rest of the development of the Jaegers...”

“But they moved away from it. After Sevier.”

Hael nodded. “That does not mean it was not brilliant. De Havilland brilliant. Caitlin is still around, is she? And Jasper, and Sergio?” He was suddenly anxious. As if somehow he could have missed the deaths of them, and no one would have told him. 

“Yes, they both are,” Raleigh replied, only becoming more confused by how intimate Hael seemed with them. He spoke as if he’d been there, as if he had been around for so much of it. Had he not been involved in the research as closely as Lightcap and D’Onofrio and Schoenfeld? He wasn’t an engineer, a scientist, or a pilot. Raleigh didn’t know everyone involved in the Jaeger initiative by name, but clearly Hael had familiarity, very close familiarity, with some of the famously core people involved. How was he then only mentioned obliquely-- a secret, almost, that Choi had gotten access to? The original pons system designers had been incestous enough, and had gotten famous enough. How was Hael somehow missing from, and yet so attached, to that picture?

“I wish I had stayed,” Hael said. “I would have. But life... does not always march so neatly on.”

Oh, Raleigh knew that feeling. The ache that never stopped that was the place Yancy had been before Alaska. Hael was looking at him oddly, like he knew, like he could feel it, too...”

“Please do not think I am mad,” Hael said quietly. “But I do.”

Raleigh pulled back, straightened in his seat, scowled at him.

“No, trust me, a little,” Hael said, and leaned forward, imploring. “Ask Caitlin. Ask her about the bridge. The neural handshake. Ask her. And just... trust, a little. The hole he has left can never be filled, but it will not fill you, not forever. Trust me. The brain is more extraordinary than you can imagine.”

Raleigh’s scowl did not go away. He put some cash on the table with a thump of his fist, stood, and walked out of the bar, refusing to look back at the strange man missing from pictures the world was very clear about.

He would have to talk to Tendo about this.


	2. Chapter 2

Caitlin Lightcap dusted soil off of her jeans with the pair of gardening gloves she held in one hand, and shook her head, a fond smile on her face.

“Oh, he was a weirdo,” she said. “Dropped out of the damn sky, it seemed like. He just turned up one day in the cafeteria in the lab, knew how to make challah from scratch, charmed the pants right off of Jasper. Literally. I wish I was kidding, but I was pretty jealous for a little while. I hadn’t even known Jasper was bisexual. I don’t think Jasper knew, either.” She tucked the dirty gloves into her gardening apron and untied it, and walked towards the back door of her kitchen, and left the apron on the stoop. “Want some water? Coffee?”

Tendo Choi shook his head, and the nodded. “Coffee, sure,” he said. “So what the hell was he talking about, when he told Beckett to ask you?” he asked. “About the brain being more extraordinary, and about the hole... he was furious, Caitlin.”

“Of course he was,” Caitlin said. “You’d be furious too if someone just settled into your deepest, most horrific trauma and just started picking through it like they knew all about it. The Beckett brothers’ last fight was a huge media event. Losing his brother has been a sensationalist circus every time the news runs a little threadbare. All those rags about ‘Tragic Raleigh Turns To Drugs’, all that trash.”

“He never turned to drugs,” Tendo said, almost angrily.

“I know he didn’t, don’t take that tone with me,” Caitlin said, frowning at him. Tendo looked apologetic. “I said it was trash, didn’t I? But who would blame him if he had? He and Yancy were in the Drift together when Yancy was killed. That kind of shit leaves a huge scar. I bet if we put him into a neural imaging system, we’d literally be able to see it.”

“So what was it about?” Tendo asked again, accepting the mug from Caitlin, full of black coffee. “The whole business Urmen was talking about?”

“Holes,” Caitlin said, and looked suddenly distracted, not making eye contact with Tendo. She put the coffee pot down, her own mug only half full, and turned away from him, to pick up her phone, and entered a query into it. Her expression only grew more distracted, and she frowned, staring off into the distance for a moment before she looked at Tendo. “The hole between the Pacific, and the Kaiju world. If they’re decommissioning...”

“Caitlin, what are you talking about?”

“I’ve got to call Stacker,” she said. “And if you want to pull the last neural image you have on file for Raleigh, you can help him make that hole smaller. Before he disengaged from Gipsy Danger was the biggest that ‘hole’ will ever have been. He’s healed his way through it, and I mean that literally, neurologically. The fresh wound is the biggest. He will have filled things in on his own to continue functioning, to continue piloting the Jaeger. You look at that, and you find someone whose strengths border where he started to fill in the neural wound-- you help him make that hole smaller.” 

“You mean find him a new Drift partner,” Tendo said, somewhat incredulous.

“Yes,” she said. “It’s possible. It’s exactly what Hael said. The brain is more extraordinary than you can imagine.”


	3. Chapter 3

Jasper Schoenfeld had his arms crossed over his abdomen, and he shook his head a little. He didn’t want to be watching this footage again; he didn’t want to remember this all. Things were already in the shitter; the Jaeger program was being decommissioned, and everyone was going to cower behind the Wall. Jasper had seen enough variation in Kaiju that he knew a wall would only mean Kaiju would learn to fly. He’d read Dr. Geiszler’s theory of Kaiju adaptation. If Jasper’s opinion had any weight these days, he’d make everyone sitting on that damn board read it, except that none of them would understand it. They were politicians. That was about it.

On the screen, Sachael Urmen was staying very still, considering what it was his brain was being subjected to. A readout that played simultaneously showed the sheer impossibility that was the man Jasper had unintentionally dragged into the middle of the development of the Jaeger piloting systems. 

The problem was that Hael’s brain didn’t work the way literally every other brain ever mapped by this technology worked. It made leaps, had gaps, worked incorrectly. Jasper was not quite the expert that Caitlin was in this sort of thing, not by a long shot. But even he could tell that Hael’s brain was just wrong. And it was that wrong that had eventually helped Caitlin figure out how to fix the problems with the Pons systems; it was the leaps and flickers that were showing at that very moment on the screen that helped Caitlin fill the gaps that had dramatically reduced the risks of chasing RABITs. 

On the screen, Hael was chasing a RABIT. He was sobbing, openly sobbing, and speaking in what he and Caitlin and Sergio had concluded, later, could only have been his family tongue, because it didn’t make any sense to anyone who had ever heard him speak it. And his brain was doing that strange leaping, jumping, moving despite what were very clear dark spots in his brain that by all rights should have indicated that he was-- well-- brain dead. But Hael wasn’t brain dead. He’d never been anything like it. 

“No wonder you guys buried this,” Tendo murmured, watching the readout.

“Who the fuck would have believed us?” Jasper said. 

“I’m watching it, and I’m still not sure I do,” Tendo admitted. 

“Me either. But it was always like this. His brain just... did shit, it never should have.”

“It’s kind of horrifying.”

Jasper just nodded, and stopped the playback. Tendo’s eyes moved over the screen, the readout, Urmen’s tear-stroked face.

“You know that language he’s speaking?” Jasper indicated the screen. “There’s literally nothing on Earth that comes near it. Not enough that it makes sense. The closest is Punjabi, but even then, the similarities are only surface.”

Tendo did not like where this was going. 

“And he just vanished. After Caitlin and Sergio... after I gave them my blessing. He helped me sort my shit out, helped me keep my shit together, and he just vanished. We looked, but... we were in the thick of it, then. We didn’t have a lot of time. No one did, for a long time. But if he’s back... it means something’s going on.”

“Stop it, man,” Tendo said, and shook his head. “You make him sound like a ghost story.”

“That’s what I’m saying,” Jasper said. “He is. He’s a fucking ghost story. He shows up, and fucking huge things happen. He doesn’t do any of them, but he’s there. And then just when things are about to hit the fan, he’s gone. Or maybe just after, when he knows that it’s going to be okay, that whatever he’s done has been enough. And then he’s gone again.”

“You think finding Raleigh someone else that’s Drift compatible is... is him doing that ‘enough’?” Tendo asked. 

“The fuck I know,” Jasper sighed. “But it’s not a bad start. I’d see if I could get Stacker to bring him back on board. It at least would give you a chance at whatever... clusterfuck we’re headed towards with all this.”

“He’s getting pieces we need on the board.”

Jasper nodded. “Seems like.”

Tendo finished lunch with Jasper, and walked to his car, and drove back to his apartment. There were boxes everywhere; he was moving to Hong Kong, to the Shatterdome there. When he opened the door, Hael had just taped up another box, and smiled at him, and put the tape down and stacking the box with its fellows against the wall. 

“Hey,” he said. “How did lunch go?”

“Well, I guess,” Tendo said, putting his keys on the table and closing the door. He walked over to Hael and gave him a light kiss, which Hael returned, and wrapped his arms around Hael’s waist. “Is there anything you can remember... anything about Jasper, and Caitlin, and the neural handshake?”

Hael’s brows knit, and he thought, hard, and then shook his head. “No,” he said, and there was no acrid taste of lies on his tongue. “No. I remember the name Caitlin. And I know what a neural handshake is, from the news.” He ran his thumb over Tendo’s jaw, and he frowned deeply. “This is... this is one of those moments I should remember something important, is it not?”

“Hey,” Tendo said, kissing that spot between Hael’s eyebrows. “Don’t look like that. You can’t help it. We’ll get it figured out. Just gotta take it one step at a time. We’ll get there.”

“I am sorry,” Hael murmured. “If I could remember...”

“I know,” Tendo replied, and gave him a squeeze. “I know.”


End file.
